Just because sony hasnt mentioned how much doesnt mean the rumours are true. The 6gb and saying the article is rubbish is more believable by certain insiders.
Digital f also said ps4 has 7 mins while sony said 15.
To be honest, i woukdnt be surprised if the rumour was given to them by pro microsoft guy and from just a rumour its caused all this crap.
If that article gets thrown out the window, i think everything should boycott df.

One thing I don't see anyone taking into consideration in this debate is the fact that 3GBs is ALL the VMEM a PC developer can expect to use. There is literally no reason for a developer on PS4 to really need a whole lot more memory than that because in PC, you have to clone textures to main memory that the CPU needs to make changes to before that is sent back to the videocard and vise versa. With unified memory, you really only need to take into consideration the amount of memory you need for game objects and then only your actual game code on top of that.

Anything north of 4.5 GBs is ideal for developers until things go really top-end, which we should all agree, is not bloody likely to happen at the launch of a console (anyone remember PS3s launch year? Maybe 3 or 4 gems there tops). So, it really is in Sony's best interest to hold on to that system RAM until they can justify letting go of it. Every time they down-size that system-allocated memory, it draws a ring around how much they can expand the system and services available to it in the future. You can bet your ass there is a reason why MS is using up so much memory towards the system and it has everything to do with their "entertainment in one" device.

Sony is in a game of chicken with MS in this regard. Sony's "games first" mantra will only go so far as they don't find themselves placed out of a market they helped create because the other guy pulled a Wii-move with some app-support that you can't possibly do because you have already tied your horse to a pole across town while the raiders come in firing away. It is for THIS reason that I find this article by Leadbetter that started this whole mess incredibly suspect. Someone is trying to smoke Sony out of their hole and it has become a giant internet $#@!-storm over absolutely nothing. Obviously, XBox supporters have gotten their first sniff of a potential "issue" with the PS4 and are dog-piling all over it and shouting from every mountain top they can about it. What's going on behind closed doors with the gaming press is where the real story is at IMHO.

Oh man, Lefein, you used to be cool several years ago but now you have been pressured to take the tepid lukewarm neutral stance on game consoles required by this forum. The big problem that many aren't seeing is you can't have passion with tepid, lukewarm. PSU declared passion verboten many years ago so we go into the bland future.

You are forgetting Cerny said the memory architecture was going to allow for substantial GPGPU computations. Don't ever bring PC characteristics to the PS4. PC's use PCI-e between CPU and GPU, huge bottleneck. Too many gamers are now starting to think because a multi-core x86 CPU is central, that the system architecture a priori is like a PC. There are many paradigms falling to the wayside with the PS4 system architecture and people that are stuck in explaining everything with PC analogies are just going to result in whole bunch of 1's and 0's confusion, filling gigabytes of bandwidth with junk. That is why Cerny is the systems architecture lead and we are not.

Pacing in wait of Sony's imminent DOOM!...since 2006

PS4 - The Only Hardcore Gaming Console = All Your Baserape Are Belong To Us

Oh man, Lefein, you used to be cool several years ago but now you have been pressured to take the tepid lukewarm neutral stance on game consoles required by this forum. The big problem that many aren't seeing is you can't have passion with tepid, lukewarm. PSU declared passion verboten many years ago so we go into the bland future.

i quite disagree

Leffy hasn't changed at all, just that we all have to be more careful with what we say. some people can consider the slightest thing trolling or flamebaiting.

he's just as passionate since the day he joined this forum. and i'm passionate about the playstation brand to no end!

Don't ever bring PC characteristics to the PS4. PC's use PCI-e between CPU and GPU, huge bottleneck. Too many gamers are now starting to think because a multi-core x86 CPU is central, that the system architecture a priori is like a PC. There are many paradigms falling to the wayside with the PS4 system architecture and people that are stuck in explaining everything with PC analogies are just going to result in whole bunch of 1's and 0's confusion, filling gigabytes of bandwidth with junk. That is why Cerny is the systems architecture lead and we are not.

Blig, the system is actually setup very much like a PC.

1/ Memory is still split, and allocated two one of 2 buss's

Bus 1 -176gb/s to form GPU caches.

Bus 2 -Around 20gb/s to from CPU

The third bus, runs between the CPU->GPU, this is new. It goes form the CPU->GPU without having to hit the GPU caches, it is also 20gb/s. But it has no access to memory (I have a theory it does have some form of memory maybe even up to 128mb, but I have no absolute proof).

PCI runs around the same (16gb/s from memory).

In traditional terms it very very PC like. But....as you say.....

When you delve into it, and really start using that 3rd bus. It becomes quite apparent why that 176gb is for GPU only, and why there are so many compute units, as I have long stated, it's actually imbalanced for use as GPU. Increase the clock speed of the GPU would actually help the average GPU shader code out, far more than simply throwing more CU's at it like Sony did.

So why did they? Because of that bus.
The ability to spin off task from the CPU directly to GPU means the GPU can then send back results back to the ram. And lets face it largely parallel tasks are usually consist of only 2 things

Mynd. The memory is not split. It's unified. There's no useless time consuming edram puzzle to be solve, like xbone's weaker split ram.

Yep, Mynd is wrong. The PS4 has unified memory. Mark Cerny even talked about that. He said unified memory was what developers told him and Sony they wanted so they put it in the PS4. I think it was when spoke at Game Labs. And http://www.vg247.com/2013/02/20/ps4-...l-performance/

Mynd. The memory is not split. It's unified. There's no useless time consuming edram puzzle to be solve, like xbone's weaker split ram.

Originally Posted by mistercrow

Yep, Mynd is wrong. The PS4 has unified memory. Mark Cerny even talked about that. He said unified memory was what developers told him and Sony they wanted so they put it in the PS4. I think it was when spoke at Game Labs.

Nope, wrong.
Its a unified pool of memory, its not unified memory.

The memory must be tagged and split as either Video Ram, or CPU ram. YOu can use it as "shared" but the performance penalty is apparently awefull.

Cerney actually talks about a unified pool. And yes its certainly more flexible than hard limits, but its still has to be allocated.

More crucial is how the 8GB of RAM in the PlayStation 4 is utilised. This unified pool is a significant advantage over platforms like PC and PS3, where CPU and graphics RAM takes the form of two entirely separate pools of memory. The PS4 operates a system where memory is allocated either to the CPU or GPU, using two separate memory buses.

"One's called the Onion, one's called the Garlic bus. Onion is mapped through the CPU caches... This allows the CPU to have good access to memory," explains Jenner.

"Garlic bypasses the CPU caches and has very high bandwidth suitable for graphics programming, which goes straight to the GPU. It's important to think about how you're allocating your memory based on what you're going to put in there."

"One issue we had was that we had some of our shaders allocated in Garlic but the constant writing code actually had to read something from the shaders to understand what it was meant to be writing - and because that was in Garlic memory, that was a very slow read because it's not going through the CPU caches. That was one issue we had to sort out early on, making sure that everything is split into the correct memory regions otherwise that can really slow you down."

yes, to answer your question, it's the superior solution. no amount of spin is gonna change that

Superior to what? MS's solution?
It will be superior when it comes to things like GP compute. In fact its geared to GP compute.
I don't know about the other way cause I don't know what real world things will impact on either system.

Superior to what? MS's solution? It will be superior when it comes to things like GP compute. In fact its geared to GP compute. I don't know about the other way cause I don't know what real world things will impact on either system.

Yeah, the architecture incorporates a mutant hybrid of HSA. Something I'm pretty sure the Xbone doesn't have going. The PS4 leverages alot of upcoming Kaveri HSA features. The Xbone seems to be based on Kabini, which doesn't have next-gen HSA support.

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